Updated 5/23/08

Name :: Dan
Alias :: Nite Phire
Location :: Illinois [USA]
Age :: 19
Gender :: Male
Sexual Orientation :: Heterosexual
Relationship Status :: Single
Web Design Experience :: 6+ Years [Since August, 2001]
Favorite Foods :: French Fries, Fried Rice
Favorite Drinks :: Sunshine In a Cup [a.k.a. Apple Cider], Mountain Dew Code Red, Bawls
Favorite Colors :: Black, Red, White, Blue
School :: University Of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Academic Major :: Computer Engineering
Academic Minor :: Engineering Physics

Favorite Animes ::

Candidate For Goddess, Cowboy Bebop, Digimon, DN Angel, FLCL, Fruits Basket, Full Metal Panic!, Fullmetal Alchemist, Get Backers, Gravitation, Hellsing, Love Hina, Naruto, Noir, Ouran High School Host Club, Rurouni Kenshin, Serial Experiments Lain, Soul Eater, Suzuka, Trigun, Wolf’s Rain, Yu Yu Hakusho

Favorite Books ::

1984, Abhorsen Trilogy, Artemis Fowl, Bartimaeus Trilogy, Bartleby, Cat’s Cradle, The Catcher in the Rye, A Clockwork Orange, Coldfire Trilogy, Eragon, The Glass Menagerie, The Great Gatsby, Harry Potter, His Dark Materials Trilogy, Lord of the Rings, The Madness Season, The Silent Empire Series, Six Characters in Search of an Author, Slaughterhouse-Five, The Virgin Suicides, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf

Favorite Games ::

Dance Dance Revolution, Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, Maple Story, Neverwinter Nights Series, Pokemon Series, Skies Of Arcadia Legends, Super Smash Bros. Series, Tales Of Symphonia, Zelda Series

Favorite Mangas ::

Bleach, Death Note, Full Metal Panic!, Fullmetal Alchemist, Hana Kimi, Hellsing, Hikaru no Go, Love Hina, Naruto, Rurouni Kenshin

Favorite Movies ::

5 Centimeters Per Second, 10 Things I Hate About You, Accepted, A Beautiful Mind, Beyond the Clouds, Children Of Men, A Christmas Story, Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, Garden State, Howl’s Moving Castle, Inside Man, John Tucker Must Die, Juno, Knocked Up, The Lake House, The Last Kiss, Mean Girls, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Pan’s Labyrinth, Princess Mononoke, Pulp Fiction, Rain Man, Serenity, Spirited Away, Superbad

Favorite Music ::

The Academy Is…, AFI, The All-American Rejects, Anti-Flag, Arctic Monkeys, Armor For Sleep, Asian Kung-Fu Generation, Bandits Of the Acoustic Revolution, Belle & Sebastian, Ben Folds, Billy Talent, Bloc Party, Blue October, Brand New, Breaking Benjamin, Cat Stevens, Coheed and Cambria, Cursive, Daft Punk, Dashboard Confessional, Death Cab For Cutie, The Decemberists, Eiffel 65, Fall Out Boy, Finch, Flow, From First To Last, Funeral For a Friend, Hawthorne Heights, Hidden In Plain View, Hot Hot Heat, Jack’s Mannequin, Kimya Dawson, June, Less Than Jake, Linkin Park, Lostprophets, Mae, Mindless Self Indulgence, Modest Mouse, The Moldy Peaches, Motion City Soundtrack, Mustard Plug, Of Montreal, The Pillows, Postal Service, Regina Spektor, Rise Against, The Rocket Summer, Saosin, Sherwood, The Shins, Silverstein, Ska-P, Something Corporate, Stars, Streetlight Manifesto, Sufjan Stevens, Taking Back Sunday, Ted Leo & the Pharmacists, Three Days Grace, Tilly and the Wall, Trust Company, The Used, Vendetta Red, We Are Scientists, Xtension Chords

Favorite TV Shows ::

Firefly, Grey’s Anatomy, How I Met Your Mother, The Office, Private Practice, Scrubs, Stargate Atlantis, Stargate SG-1

Hobbies/Interests ::

Abusing Cingular’s Unlimited Night & Weekend Minutes, Anime, Arguing With Teachers, Being a Geek, Being Nonsensical, Being the Best Person In the World, Computers, Confusing People, Cuddling, Driving Like a Grandma, Exemplifying Narcissism, Having an Addictive Personality, Hugs, Listening To an Average of 56 Songs Per Day, Listening To People Tell Me They Hate Me and Waiting a Few Seconds Before They Realize That Their Love For Me Far Outweighs Their Hate, Maintaining an Enormous Music Collection, Manga, Not Being Able To Sit Still, Not Having Reasons For Important Things, Over-Achieving, Over-Analyzing Insignificant Things, Playing Guitar Terribly, Ping-Pong, Reading, Recalling Useless Facts From Ages Past, Slacking Off, Soccer, Staying Up Far Too Late, Ultimate Frisbee, Video Games

Philosophical Briefing ::

“I am the Unbeliever, a shadow on the planes; a whisper true, a song to you, my lover’s soul refrains.”

I think, therefore I am. It is not because I believe that I am human, but because I ponder. My mind is a cacophany of mental noise, the shouts and whispers of ideas brilliant and astonishing. I do not claim to be greater than any other, for I believe all of us exist in this manner. Some people simply do not share my views. They attempt to explain everything, and if they cannot explain, or they cannot cope with that short-coming, they create a belief in an entity and share it with others. This is the concept we call religion. I have no belief that God exists, but do not have reason to believe that God does not exist either. I have thought of no ways by which we can prove that God does or does not exist, only ways by which we cannot. As human beings we are incapable of understanding an entity deserving of the label God, and so I do not attempt to. Thus I am an unbeliever, and my soul, my thoughts, my very essence, refuse to believe a kernel of knowledge until it has proven itself to me as undeniable fact.

With this in mind, I quote once again, “For humankind to obtain, something of equal value must be lost. This is the law of equivalent exchange.” I do believe this statement to be an undeniable truth. It has proved itself time and time again in this world. Everything takes, at the barest minimum, time and some sort of effort or luck. Nothing is won without some sort of loss. That loss can never be re-won, and to quietly mourn that loss and move on is all we can do.

CREATE TABLE special ::

That’s right. My page is “special.” Hehehe. If you actually read the Philosophical Briefing, you’ve seen that I do have a serious and randomly intellectual side which I shall now proceed to utterly contradict. Well, I’ll try to at least. ^_^

I like to think of myself as a sarcastic, narcissistic, arrogant asshole. Oddly enough, it seems that people don’t like to believe me when I say that. It takes a lot of convincing. Then once I finally get them to see that, they love me even more. How does that make sense? Seriously. It’s like 1 + 1 = 10. And that really does make sense by the way. If you can figure out why, kudos to you.

As for arrogance, I consider myself the most intelligent person I know. I was in the top 2% of my high school class. 7th out of 443. I laugh at that fact because every person above me in class rank came to me for help with homework on multiple occasions.

I am an uber geek. I was on the math team. I wear my mathlete shirt and my “I <3 Relativity shirt all the time. I’m a computer geek as well. I know XHTML, CSS, quite a bit of PHP and MySQL, basic C, and I’m not too shabby with Photoshop. I have assembled multiple custom PCs for myself and helped friends to build more. I watch anime, love to read fantasy/sci-fi, and play RPGs including Neverwinter Nights and Maple Story. Classic geek, right? In defiance of the geek standard, I also happen to be fairly socially proficient. Hence I label myself a “social oxymoron.” I’d have to say I am fairly popular with the ladies, and I am quite aware of it. The combination of my addictive personality, dashing good looks, and flirtatious manner make it difficult not to fall for me. Narcissism at its finest, eh?

Umm … what else to write … I like ramen. ^_^ I took Spanish in high school, but as a side-effect from all that fan-subbed anime I watch I’ve taken to liking the Japanese language more. I’ve tried to learn some basic vocabulary and sentence structure. At least enough to say I’m an idiot. Baka desu. Anata wa baka desu ka? ^_^